Using The Wink Hub With OpenHAB

January 8, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

Spend enough time looking at home automation setups, and you’ll quickly find there are two competing philosophies. The first wants to put an Arduino on every light socket, with everything connected by cheap eBay radio modules. The second home automation philosophy requires astonishingly expensive hardware to talk to other expensive modules. The Arduino solution is a system that can be infinitely customizable, and the commercial solution talks to ‘the cloud’ for some strange reason. There is no middle ground. At least there wasn’t until [Eric] started poking around and looked at a few hardware solutions.

[Eric] was looking to control some GE Link bulbs through his phone, computer, or through the Internet. They’re supposed to be the best bulb on the market in terms of price and performance, but they can only be controlled with a Zigbee. This lead [Eric] to an interesting hack that gave all owners of the Wink Hub local control of their devices. From [Eric]’s research, this was the only way his lighting wasn’t dependent on ‘the cloud’.

Local control of the Wink was only possible after [Eric] read a post on rooting the Wink (and this post from a few days ago). Because the device could be rooted, and the fact that [Eric] already has a few things in his house integrated with OpenHAB, the choice on how to proceed with controlling a few Zigbee enabled lights was easy.

Once [Eric] got the light bulbs talking to the Wink, integrating them with the rest of the devices in his home was easy. The new bulbs are activated with his Arduino motion sensors, door sensors, and can be controlled via smartphone or by voice control. The Wink can also be completely disconnected from the Internet. A good idea, because the ability to turn a light on and off should not be dictated by the quality of your Internet connection.

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Guitar Mute Pedal Made From Upcycled Parts

January 8, 2015 by Rich Bremer 9 Comments

Rockin’ out on your fave guitar is pretty fun for sure but whether your on stage or jamming in your basement, it can be convenient to quickly mute those killer licks. [wozlaser] wanted a mute pedal for his guitar and instead of shelling out the tens of dollars for a commercial version, he decided to build one himself.

This pedal is heavy-duty and made out of metal. If the frame looks familiar, that is because in a prior life this was a control pedal for a sewing machine. [wozlaser] found it cheap at a thrift store. After the internals were taken out, he added a few key parts. First were the 1/4″ input and output jacks that were scavenged from an old stereo system. There is a momentary switch from a VCR and a standard guitar stomp pedal switch mounted all the way in the front of the frame. The wiring is as follows:

The wiring schematic is pretty darn simple, it just grounds and ungrounds the signal wire. As stated earlier, there are 2 switches, a momentary and a push-on/push-off switch. A normal mute pedal would only have one switch but [wozlaser] wanted something special. If you push the pedal all the way forward it will mute or unmute the signal until it is pushed again. When the pedal is in the spring-supported ‘up’ position a lever pushes on the momentary switch, a slight push on the pedal lifts the lever off of the momentary switch to mute or unmute the signal. The function of the momentary switch (mute or unmute) changes with the state of the other switch. This works exactly the same as a 3-way light switch circuit allows two switches to control one light in your house. With this setup [wozlaser] is able to not only mute and unmute his guitar but strum a chord with it off and pulse the chord on to the beat of the music or tap the pedal with some guitar feedback to make the sound cut in and out. All that only cost [wozlaser] a little time and spare parts… and there are no batteries to replace!

IBling Is An LED Display Necklace

January 8, 2015 by Rick Osgood 12 Comments

Are you tired of being ignored? Do you want a fashion accessory that says, “Pay attention to me!” If so, you should check out [Al’s] recent instructable. He’s built himself a necklace that includes a display made up of 512 individual LEDs.

This project was built from mostly off-the-shelf components, making it an easy beginner project. The LED display is actually a product that you can purchase for just $25. It includes 512 LEDs aligned in a 16 x 32 grid. The module is easily controlled with a Pixel maker’s kit. This board comes with built-in functionality to control one of these LED modules and can accept input from a variety of sources including Android or PC. The unit is powered from a 2000 mAH LiPo battery.

[Al] had to re-flash the firmware of the Pixel to set it to a low power mode. This mode allows him to get about seven hours of battery life with the 2000 mAH battery. Once the hardware was tested and confirmed to work correctly, [Al] had to pretty things up a bit. Some metallic gold spray paint and rhinestones transformed the project’s cyberpunk look into something you might see in a hip hop video, or at least maybe a Weird Al hip hop video.

The Pixel comes with several Android apps to control the display via Bluetooth. [Al] can choose one of several modes. The first mode allows for pushing animated gif’s to the display. Another will allow the user to specify text to scroll on the display. The user can even specify the text using voice recognition. The final mode allows the user to specify a twitter search string. The phone will push any new tweets matching the terms to the display as scrolling text.

Faulty ESP8266s Release Smoke, Then Keep Working?

January 8, 2015 by Matt Freund 83 Comments

[Ray] is in a bit of a pickle. All appeared well when he began selling an ESP8266-based product, but shortly thereafter some of them got hot and let the smoke out. Not to worry, he recommends ignoring the problem since once the faulty components have vaporized the device will be fine.

The symptom lies in the onboard red power indicator LED smoking. (Probably) nothing is wrong with the LED, because upon testing the batch he discovered its current limiting resistor is sometimes a little bit low to spec. Off by a hair of, oh, call it an even 1000x.

Yep, the 4700 ohm resistor is sometimes replaced with a 4.7 ohm. Right across the power rail. That poor little LED is trying to dissipate half a watt on a pinhead. Like a sparrow trying to slow a sledgehammer, it does not end well. Try not to be too critical, pick ‘n place machines have rough days now and then too and everyone knows those reels look practically the same!

The good news is that the LED and resistor begin a thermal race and whoever wins escapes in the breeze. Soon as the connection cuts the heat issue disappears and power draw drops back to normal. Everything is fine unless you needed that indicator light. Behold – there are not many repairs you can make with zero tools, zero effort, and only a few seconds of your time.

[Ray] also recommends measuring and desoldering the resistor or LED if you are one of the unlucky few, or, if worst comes to worst, he has of course offered to replace the product too. He did his best to buy from authentic vendors and apologizes to the few customers affected. As far as he knows no one else has had this problem yet so he wanted to share it with the community here on Hackaday as soon as possible. Keep an eye out.

If you have never seen ~~smoke~~ ISO9001-certified electronics repair before, there is a short video of this particular ~~disaster~~ upgrade caught live on tape after the break.

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When Responsible Disclosure Isn’t Enough

January 8, 2015 by Rick Osgood 37 Comments

Moonpig is a well-known greeting card company in the UK. You can use their services to send personalized greeting cards to your friends and family. [Paul] decided to do some digging around and discovered a few security vulnerabilities between the Moonpig Android app and their API.

First of all, [Paul] noticed that the system was using basic authentication. This is not ideal, but the company was at least using SSL encryption to protect the customer credentials. After decoding the authentication header, [Paul] noticed something strange. The username and password being sent with each request were not his own credentials. His customer ID was there, but the actual credentials were wrong.

[Paul] created a new account and found that the credentials were the same. By modifying the customer ID in the HTTP request of his second account, he was able to trick the website into spitting out all of the saved address information of his first account. This meant that there was essentially no authentication at all. Any user could impersonate another user. Pulling address information may not sound like a big deal, but [Paul] claims that every API request was like this. This meant that you could go as far as placing orders under other customer accounts without their consent.

[Paul] used Moonpig’s API help files to locate more interesting methods. One that stood out to him was the GetCreditCardDetails method. [Paul] gave it a shot, and sure enough the system dumped out credit card details including the last four digits of the card, expiration date, and the name associated with the card. It may not be full card numbers but this is still obviously a pretty big problem that would be fixed immediately… right?

[Paul] disclosed the vulnerability responsibly to Moonpig in August 2013. Moonpig responded by saying the problem was due to legacy code and it would be fixed promptly. A year later, [Paul] followed up with Moonpig. He was told it should be resolved before Christmas. On January 5, 2015, the vulnerability was still not resolved. [Paul] decided that enough was enough, and he might as well just publish his findings online to help press the issue. It seems to have worked. Moonpig has since disabled its API and released a statement via Twitter claiming that, “all password and payment information is and has always been safe”. That’s great and all, but it would mean a bit more if the passwords actually mattered.

Measuring The Planck Constant With Lego

January 8, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 47 Comments

For nearly 130 years, the kilogram has been defined by a small platinum and iridium cylinder sitting in a vault outside Paris. Every other unit of measurement is defined by reproducible physical phenomenon; the second is a precise number of oscillations of a cesium atom, and a meter is the length light travels in 1/299792458th of a second. Only the kilogram is defined by an actual object, until NIST and the International Committee of Weights and Measures defines it as a function of the Planck constant. How do you measure the Planck constant? With a Watt balance. How do you build a Watt balance? With Lego, of course.

A Watt balance looks like a double-armed scale where one weight can be compared to another weight of known mass. Instead of using two arms, a Watt balance only has one arm, brought into balance by a current flowing through a coil. The mechanical power in the balance – brought about by whatever is on the balance plate – can then be compared to the electrical power, and eventually the Planck constant. This will soon be part of the formal definition of the kilogram, and yes, a machine to measure this can be made out of Lego.

The only major non-Lego parts in the Lego Watt balance are a few coils of wire wound around a PVC pipe and a few neodymium magnets. These are placed on both arms of the balance, and a pair of lasers are used to make sure both arms of the balance are level. Data are collected by measuring the coils through a few analog pins on a Labjack and a Phidget. Once the voltage and current induced in each coil is measured, the Wattage can be calculated, then the Planck constant, and finally how close the mass on the balance pan is to a real, idealized kilogram. Despite being made out of Lego, this system can measure a gram mass to 1% uncertainty.

The authors have included a list of Lego parts, most of which could be found in any giant tub of Lego in an 8-year-old’s closet. The only really expensive item on the BOM is a 16-bit USB DAQ; apart from that, it’s something anyone can build.

Thanks [Matt] for the tip.

Best Of The Dinosaur Den 2014

January 7, 2015 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

If you haven’t been watching The Dinosaur Den, shame on you. This joint enterprise between [Fran Blanche] and our very own [Bil Herd] premiered in July and it is, simply put, the duck’s guts. In spite of being introduced to each other just a few months before the first episode, they banter like old friends. When they’re not riffing off each other, they’re giving a show and tell of all kinds of vintage technology. Most importantly, they’re always wearing really cool t-shirts.

Hot on the heels of their excellent holiday special comes this Best of the Dinosaur Den 2014 highlight reel. Some of our favorite bits are from said holiday special, because they spent the whole hour talking about their best-loved toys from holidays past, most of which started them on their paths to greatness. Come for the t-shirts, stay for the Zaxxon tabletop arcade and the toy that probably inspired LittleBits. Check out the best-of after the break, and then cook a Hot Pocket or something and watch them all. You’re pretty much guaranteed to learn something cool and/or useful.

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